Chapter 103 (1/2)
It's a damn good thing that Marcus had insisted on first aid lessons for Dan. The man had been an actual medical doctor before he had turned to teaching and took personal offense at anyone unable to properly suture a cut. He had been very thorough in his emergency triage training, having loudly explained that everybody should have a basic grasp of human anatomy, and how to piece it back together, in case of sudden and unexpected violence. What Dan had first dismissed as a ramshackle justification to make him suffer was paying off in spades now, as he attempted to stabilize a bleeding out mad scientist.
Dan's decision to use his power on a living—if incorporeal—human had resulted in what one might generously describe as a 'slight maiming'. Andros Bartholomew's right leg was simply gone below the knee, with the exception of some dangling meaty bits that Dan was trying to not look too hard at. Dozens of long, thin strips had been removed from the man's other leg. It was so mangled that Dan suspected it might have been kinder to have tossed the villain into a wood-chipper.
The reason Dan could identify all these wonderful details was simple. Bartholomew's power affected his clothes, which were now in tatters. The once pristine lab coat was hanging by bare threads, and his pants were as shredded as his legs. His glasses were nowhere to be seen. His shirt was sporting several new holes, and what little Dan could see of the man's chest was covered in razor-thin cuts.
But none of these minor disfigurements neared the devastation that was his face. Whatever the doctor had put in his nasty little capsule, it was less a toxin than an acid. The brief, two second exposure to the liquid had badly melted Bartholomew's face, turning him into something of a burn victim.
Dan felt little sympathy for that. The bastard had put that stuff inside of him. Dan's only concern was the difficulty people might face in identifying the villain at a glance, now that he was missing most of his physical features.
On a completely unrelated note, Dan was desperately relieved that his power did not work on humans in normal circumstances. The possibility of doing something like this on accident, to a completely consenting non-villainous person was enough to make him queasy. He'd hate to have to put back together someone he actually cared about.
Which brought Dan's focus back to the present, and to the softly moaning, slowly dying scientist before him. For a man missing half of his leg and probably a chunk of his femoral artery, Andros Bartholomew was not bleeding all that badly. It was something that Dan had noticed the first time he'd used his power against the man, and he was glad that the pattern had held true. That said, there was still an alarming amount of red liquid pouring onto the floor. As much as Dan would not mourn Bartholomew's passing, he found that he couldn't quite bring himself to just watch the man bleed out.
And if some deeply buried part of his mind noted that the mad scientist would likely suffer a lot longer if he lived, well, Dan would never admit it.
With his course of action decided, Marcus's medical training kicked in, and Dan set to work. Without knowing where Andros had stashed Dan's go-bag, Dan could only pillage his home's medicine cabinet for supplies. He busted open his personal first aid kit, then his back-up one, and reappeared in the little doctor's office.
Andros had progressed from groaning to weeping, and he had almost managed to crawl his way out of the entrance to the room. Dan quickly grabbed him by the less mutilated leg, and pulled him back inside, a task made much easier by the red lubricant that was splattered across the floor. Ignoring the increasingly agonized protests, Dan set about disinfecting the wounded areas. He dipped the villain's stump in coagulant, emptied the rest of his QuikClot on mangled-but-still-attached limb, then pulled out a half dozen rolls of gauze.
About halfway through wrapping the first of many wounds, he considered just trying to teleport Andros to an ER. The mad scientist was mostly incoherent, but Dan figured a good slap would send him back into his mist state. Though, considering the man hadn't yet done that himself, it was entirely possible that something unfortunate would occur. Or maybe Bartholomew was simply petrified of Dan repeating his splinching trick. Regardless, Dan quickly concluded that the likelihood of the terrorist arriving as more meat paste than man was unacceptably high.
It only took him a few minutes to cocoon Bartholomew's two limbs in gauze. The beleaguered terrorist had passed out at some point during the brief operation, though his pulse was about as steady as could be expected given the circumstances. Dan briefly considered finishing his patch job by suturing up the many cuts along the man's body, but decided it wasn't worth the effort. Now that the man was no longer in immediate danger, Dan had much higher priorities.
He whipped out his phone, confirmed that it still had a signal, then called Abby. She picked up on the second ring, greeting him in a cheerful, chirpy voice that was completely at odds with his present situation.
”Danny! How are you?”
Dan blinked at the general lack of alarm in her voice, but quickly realized the reason. She was his emergency contact for... just about everything. She should've been the first person to have been contacted once his disappearance had been noticed. If she didn't know, then nobody had noticed yet.
She wasn't even in the state at the moment, so she probably hadn't realized that he was on his training mission; he doubted that the fire was getting anything more than local news coverage. He... hadn't thought to tell her, either. That was going to get him an earful.
”Danny? Is everything okay?” she asked after several moments of silence.
The concern in her voice made him wince. He braced himself for the impending explosion, and said, ”Now sweetheart, don't panic, but I've got something I need to tell you.”
It didn't take long for Dan to summarize his situation but by the end of it, judging from the stony silence on the other side of the call, he was soon going to be wishing that he could've delayed his judgement.
”Let me see if I understand this,” Abby said, with all the quiet of a storm about to break. ”You forgot to tell me that you were going on your training exam, which apparently consists of jumping into the remains of a burning building. Then, you got yourself kidnapped by trusting someone you know is untrustworthy. Then, after escaping, instead of calling the police and staying put, you went back and tried to stall your kidnapper, in some insane attempt to buy time for Connor's uncle to arrive and enact some sort of personal vendetta. Does that sound about right to you?”
”Um.” When she put it that way, it sounded a lot less clever and impressive. ”Maybe?”
”Have you called Officer Graham yet?” she demanded.
”No,” Dan replied quickly. ”I wanted to make sure you knew I was alright.”
”Call him, now,” Abby ordered quickly. ”Tell him what's going on. Be polite, because it's going to be up to him to determine whether or not you're charged with breaking some kind of vigilante law.”
”What?!” Dan yelped. ”I got kidnapped! How is this my fault?”
He heard a sigh. ”You went back, Danny. You were safe and sound. You got away, then you went back and picked a fight.
”Ah...” He had done that, hadn't he? It had seemed so reasonable at the time. ”I just figured Cornelius would be grateful.”
”He most likely will be,” Abby said, ”but he's also a professional. You can't count on him just letting you walk off. If he's half as responsible as his record indicates, he'll probably have to bring you in for questioning. I'll look for a good lawyer, just in case.”
Dan swallowed heavily. ”Right. Thanks Abs.”
”Stay safe Danny. And call me when you can.”
With a click, she was gone. Dan sighed, staring angrily down at the unconscious mad scientist. He prodded the man with his foot, grunting, ”You might've caused me a lot of trouble, jackass.”
Another deep breath, in and out, then he dialed Cornelius Graham. The SPEAR Team member picked up instantly.
”Sitrep!” he barked into the phone.
Dan floundered for a moment, before settling on, ”Stable.”
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, before a heavy sigh. ”That's not a report, Newman. What's your status? Are you safe? And is Bartholomew still at your location?”
”I'm okay,” Dan confirmed. He paused, eyeing the prone form at his feet speculatively. ”Bartholomew is down. I don't think he's going anywhere.”
”Define down,” the surly officer demanded.
Dan opened his mouth to relay what had happened, then paused. He quickly glanced around the room, confirming a lack of visible cameras. The walls didn't seem to have the infrastructure to support such technology, rotten as they were. Bartholomew had to have some form of monitoring though, as he'd rather quickly realized that Dan had woken up, but Dan was betting on something more exotic than a simple camera. The toxic tracker, maybe? Perhaps it was monitoring his vitals. Or maybe some other form of exotic observation that Dan simply wouldn't know about.